Abstract
We introduce a Monte Carlo procedure for estimating the posterior location uncertainty of events produced by NET-VISA, a Physics-Based Generative Model of global scale seismology. The procedure produces a parametric estimate (confidence ellipse) of the uncertainty in location as well as the joint uncertainty in depth and time. This takes into account the uncertainty in the measurements of all of the seismic, hydroacoustic, and infrasound phases that are detected as well as those that are not detected at operational stations including the possibility that the detections were, in fact, noise. The resulting parameteric estimates are shown to be more accurate than some of the existing deployed algorithms in evaluations on a ground truth seismic dataset. An improvement is also proposed to the NET-VISA model training to take into account the inaccuracy in the current human-labeled training data. This extra uncertainty that is injected into the model leads to even better uncertainty quantification. We also demonstrate on a number of illustrative examples that NET-VISA’s generative model leads to posterior uncertainty contours that are not accurately captured by confidence ellipses.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arora, N. S., Russell, S., & Sudderth, E. (2013). NET-VISA: Network processing vertically integrated seismic analysis. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 103(2A), 709–729.
Bolt, B. A. (1960). The revision of earthquake epicentres, focal depths and origin-times using a high-speed computer. Geophysical Journal International, 3(4), 433–440 (12).
Bondár, I., Myers, S. C., Engdahl, E. R., & Bergman, E. A. (2004). Epicentre accuracy based on seismic network criteria. Geophysical Journal International,156(3), 483–496. https://academic.oup.com/gji/article-abstract/156/3/483/610875.
Bondár, I., & North, R. G. (1999). Development of calibration techniques for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) International Monitoring System. Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, 113(1), 11–24.
Bratt, S. R., & Bache, T. C. (1986). Location estimation using regional array data. Technical report, Science Applications International Corp, San Diego, CA.
Bratt, S. R., & Bache, T. C. (1988). Locating events with a sparse network of regional arrays. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 78(2), 780–798.
Díaz, O., García-Pérez, J., Esteva, L., & Singh, S. K. (1999). Accounting for source location errors in the Bayesian analysis of seismicity and seismic hazard. Journal of seismology, 3(2), 153–166.
Engdahl, E. R., van der Hilst, R., & Buland, R. (1998). Global teleseismic earthquake relocation with improved travel times and procedures for depth determination. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 88(3), 722–743.
Flinn, E. A. (1965). Confidence regions and error determinations for seismic event location. Reviews of Geophysics, 3(1), 157–185.
Freedman, H. W. (1968). Seismological measurements and measurement error. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 58(4), 1261–1271.
Geweke, J. (1989). Bayesian inference in econometric models using Monte Carlo integration. Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society, 57, 1317–1339.
International Seismological Centre. (2021). On-line Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.31905/D808B830. Accessed 01 Jan 2021.
Le Bras, R., Arora, N., Kushida, N., Mialle, P., & Tomuta, E. (2018). Operational experience with next-generation automatic association software NET-VISA (pp. 14–17). In Seismology of the Americas Meeting, Latin American America
Le Bras, R., Arora, N., Kushida, N., Mialle, P., Bondár, I., Tomuta, E., Alamneh, F. K., Feitio, P., Villarroel, M., Vera, B., Sudakov, A., Laban, S., Nippress, S., Bowers, D., Russell, S., & Taylor, T. (2020). NET-VISA from cradle to adulthood. A machine-learning tool for seismo-acoustic automatic association. Pure and Applied Geophysics,178, 1–22.
Le Bras, R., Swanger, H., Sereno, T., Beall, G., & Jenkins, R. (1994). Global Association: final report. Science Applications International Corporation. Technical report, Techincal Report SAIC-94/1155, ADA304805, San Diego, CA.
Lomax, A., Virieux, J., Volant, P., & Berge-Thierry, C. (2000). Probabilistic earthquake location in 3d and layered models. Advances in seismic event location (pp. 101–134). Springer.
Mialle, P., Brown, D., & Arora, N. (2019). Advances in operational processing at the International Data Centre. yInfrasound monitoring for atmospheric studies (pp. 209–248). Springer.
Mousavi, S. M., & Beroza, G. C. (2019). Bayesian-deep-learning estimation of earthquake location from single-station observations. arXiv preprintarXiv:1912.01144.
Myers, S. C., Johannesson, G., & Hanley, W. (2007). A Bayesian hierarchical method for multiple-event seismic location. Geophysical Journal International,171(3), 1049–1063. https://academic.oup.com/gji/article-abstract/171/3/1049/716589.
Myers, S. C., & Schultz, C. A. (2000). Improving sparse network seismic location with Bayesian kriging and teleseismically constrained calibration events. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 90(1), 199–211.
Ng, A. & Jordan, M. (2001). On discriminative vs. generative classifiers: A comparison of logistic regression and Naive Bayes. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 14.
Tarantola, A., & Valette, B. (1982). Generalized nonlinear inverse problems solved using the least squares criterion. Reviews of Geophysics, 20(2), 219–232.
United Nations (1998). CTBT, comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty. United Nations, Dept. for Disarmament Affairs and Dept. of Public Information.. https://www.ctbto.org/the-treaty/.
Weisstein, E.W. (2022). Disk point picking. From MathWorld—A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/DiskPointPicking.html. Accessed 14 Oct.
Yang, X., Bondár, I., Bhattacharyya, J., Ritzwoller, M., Shapiro, N., & Antolik, M., et al. (2004). Validation of regional and teleseismic travel-time models by relocating ground-truth events. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America,94(3), 897–919. https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/article-abstract/94/3/897/103105.
Funding
The project is funded by Bayesian Logic, Inc.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
No applicable declarations.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Arora, G., Arora, N., Le Bras, R. et al. Importance Sampling-Based Estimate of Origin Error in NET-VISA. Pure Appl. Geophys. 180, 1253–1272 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-022-03201-x
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-022-03201-x